Time-discretising adverbials
Distributional evidence of conceptualisation patterns
This paper looks at the distribution of selected adverbials used to discretise
and quantify time in units of minutes, seconds and hours in reference language
corpora of Polish and English. We carry out an exploratory analysis of the distributional
patterns of such expressions and report three main findings. Firstly,
we observe that the discretisation intervals for minutes and seconds diverge
from the overall frequency distribution of cardinal numerals in the two corpora.
Secondly, a significant level of correlation has been found between frequency
distributions of n-seconds and n-minutes time adverbials in Polish and English
data. Finally, the distribution of salient intervals for n-hours adverbials differs
considerably from the discretisation patterns observed for n-seconds and
n-minutes expressions. We relate these findings to general cognitive aspects
of quantification and further link them to the iconic clock dial-based time
conceptualisation.